Crashing
by Luna Rapunzel
Summary: Draco returns home during his sixth year to face his demons, again. For Inkfire and The Reviews Lounge, Too Reviewathon.


**Crashing**

He hates Floo powder, hates it more with every two minutes' journey from Hogwarts to Malfoy Manor and back that he's taken thus far every week this year. It's the lungs. It's the claustrophobia of soot and ash in from all sides that scorches his throat and dizzies the air until suddenly he materializes, gasping, into the hearth, where all is still and expectant and shames him for the fleeting instant he takes to gather his breath and emerge, shoulders hunched, from that hell of a mode of transport. When he was a third year and the werewolf brought a boggart to his Defense Against the Dark Arts class, Draco's took the form of Floo powder, sitting innocently at the bottom of one of his mother's elf-made vials.

These days, Draco's got bigger boggarts to worry about. If anything, Flooing home and back may well be his favorite part of every weekend visit.

The mood at home has been somber lately, enough so that Draco barely feels he can call it "home" anymore. Rowle and Yaxley sit stiffly in the drawing room, two Death Eaters huddled at the head of a table that seats twenty—backs rigid, voices swallowed by what feels like an inherent silence in the room. They whip around to face the disturbance as Draco staggers out of the fireplace, and he can't tear his eyes away from theirs for a long moment, even as his mother comes rushing in from the kitchen, descending upon him in a flurry of kisses and whispers and the flapping of her dressing gown. "Aunt Bella is ready for you in the study," she tells him, drawing back to face him with her hands still clasped protectively to his shoulders.

Her face is once again paler than the week before, and gaunter, too, her cheeks thinning and jawbone protruding beneath the sagging skin. Dragging his eyes to meet hers, Draco forces a half-smile that doesn't extend past the corners of his lips, then jerks himself out of her grip and makes posthaste for the study. The sooner they begin, the sooner they can end, and Bellatrix never likes it when Draco's late.

When she was Draco's age, Bellatrix set fire to the Forbidden Forest during a Care of Magical Creatures lesson one afternoon. She was one of the few who could see the thestrals that Professor Kettleburn had brought to class, and within minutes of retreating beyond the gaggle of students in the clearing and into the woods, the class could smell the firewood, pleasing as if it were a bonfire, only soon the flames were licking high above the tree line and all they could hear was Bellatrix's mad laughter and hysterical cry that "You can't see them! You can't save them!"

His Uncle Rode was the one who relayed the story to Draco last year, just weeks after Draco learned that Bellatrix was his aunt to begin with, after his mother refused to answer any of Draco's questions about growing up with her sister. He'd been the only other student in the class who had seen death, and he'd gazed, transfixed, at the foul creatures that cawed with anguish as they smoldered, the blaze seizing and beating their wings. Kettleburn instructed the class to evacuate as he extinguished the fire, but just before a classmate all but dragged Rode away, he caught glimpse of Bellatrix's face between the flames, alight with thrill and a hint of desperation.

For the brief months that Draco knew the Lestranges, Uncle Rode impressed on him that Bellatrix didn't join the Dark Lord out of support for his politics or even out of love for the Dark Arts. If there are two things she loves about the Death Eaters, they are the Dark Lord's matching madness and the convenient opportunities it provided to torture the innocent. Bellatrix doesn't love any_one_ or any_thing_ but ruin and chaos, not even Uncle Rode, not even her own blood.

Bracing himself before he opens the door, Draco reminds himself for the umpteenth time to be grateful that his aunt is willing to help him at all. As always, the sentiment rings hollow.

Tonight, she cries "_Legilimens_!" before he even has a chance to set foot inside the room, and he closes his mind to everything but the sinking knowledge that it would be _so easy_ to give in, to stop fighting—that if the Dark Lord wants to punish the Malfoys for last year's battle in the Department of Mysteries, he will, no matter how long Draco practices his Defense or even whether he succeeds in repairing the cabinet. But he doesn't, for one minute, two, three, as if it's just another Floo trip and he can fall to the floor safely in seconds now. He meets Bellatrix's eyes and throws himself into blocking all else out of the battleground that has become his mind, six months of picking away at that damn cabinet every free moment he gets up at school and six months of consecutive weekends locked in this room with this madwoman, six months and his family's lives maybe at stake and maybe already good as gone, six months and reduced to crying in Myrtle's bathroom and Blaise—

"That does it," breathes Bellatrix, and her eyes widen and flash with mirth as the whole scene unfolds again in his mind, fragmented the way that Legilimency memories always are: the stickiness of his robes as he swatted impatiently at his runny eyes and nose, the draftiness of the common room, Draco's plea to leave him be and let him collapse for a while, all he needed were a few minutes to fall apart, to crash without consequence, could he do that, could Blaise let him do that, could he withhold judgment as Draco cried, could he stay so that just for a moment he wouldn't be so alone, could he kiss back, Pansy's pedestal was too high for her to understand, could he kiss back a moment please oh please?

And Bellatrix lowers her wand and wrenches Draco back to the present. He's cowered on all fours on the ground, tears threatening to fall, and can't remember how he got there. "Won't Daddy be pleased to come back from Azkaban to find out his only son's gone and become a faggot?" she says, voice so soft that Draco barely can hear her until the Cheshire smile returns to her lips and she breaks into a cackle.

He stays on the ground, where for some foolish reason or another he feels safer. "I'm not a-a—I'm _not_," mutters Draco. His voice cracks. "It would've happened the same way if it had been Daphne or Millicent or Tracey—I—it was a bad moment, that's all."

"And are you planning on having a bad moment every time you work on the cabinet?" says Bellatrix snappishly. "Are you planning on _shagging_ Dumbledore when your chance comes to kill him? The Dark Lord doesn't have _patience_ for _bad moments_, Draco; do you understand that? Do you _want_ to see your family killed? Draco, sooner or later you'll have to accept that you have no space for weakness! _Crucio_!"

He doesn't scream—he practically welcomes the pain, relishes in the physicality of the curse. More and more, Draco's starting to understand whatever it is that brings Daphne Greengrass to tear open her arms with her wand every night in the common room.

Twice more Bellatrix uses the curse before taking Draco's unresponsiveness for strength of will. "Better," she says, her lips curling into her best excuse for a genuine smile. "Now get up and try to Cruciate me."

So he does.


End file.
